ONLY TURKEY CAN RESOLVE 1915 ‘GENOCIDE’ ISSUES
By Brian Mello

Allentown Morning Call, PA
Oct 16 2007

On Oct. 10, the U.S. House Foreign Relations Committee voted on a
measure that would officially recognize the 1915-era deportations,
mass killings, and overall destruction of the Armenian population
within the Ottoman Empire as genocide. The result has been a rekindled
debate about balancing the interests of the Armenian community in
America against the interests of Turkey, a critical American ally in
an incredibly hostile region.

Yet, the question of whether to recognize an Armenian genocide involves
more than weighing the power of the Armenian lobby against the national
security interests that could be affected by alienating the Turkish
government. An accurate understanding of the events in question has
moral and political significance for the broader goal of identifying
and preventing similar tragedies.

Those who advocate calling the tragedy that befell the Ottoman
Armenians genocide have argued that this was the first genocide
of the 20th century, and that the Ottoman answer to the Armenian
question served as an example for Hitler’s final solution to the
Jewish question. For advocates of the label Armenian genocide, the
forced relocation of close to 1.5 million people, the evidence of mass
killings and the targeting of civilian populations, and the seeming
coordination of these by political and military elites in Istanbul
and in what is today eastern Turkey cannot but be seen as genocide.

At the same time, two interpretations of the events have predominated
in Turkish historiography and public opinion. One seeks to place the
blame for the events on Armenians themselves, and the other seeks
to subsume the events under the catch-phrase "war is hell." The
essential logic of both boils down to the argument that although
many Armenians died between 1915 and 1917, the Ottoman state can
hardly be held responsible for genocide. Rather, these deaths were
the sad consequences of war — a war, the Turkish story goes —
that was fomented by Armenian nationalism and the armed challenge
this posed to the survival of the Ottoman Empire. For those who have
sought to counter accusations of genocide, the explanation for the
deaths and depopulation of Ottoman Armenians lies therefore in the
exigencies of war. People died, but they died from famine, disease,
localized violence beyond the control of the central state and due
to the normal course of warfare, and not because of a coordinated
and directed program of genocide.

The persistence of this debate lies in the lack of definitive
historical evidence. Scholars have either been unable to find, or
have been prevented from searching for, evidence of direct orders for
carrying out genocide. Most of the evidence in the historical record
comes from foreign observers whose motives for characterizing the
Ottoman state have been questioned. And, some evidence seems to have
been the result of sheer fabrication. Still, although historians and
political scientists lack consensus on the use of the term genocide,
there is consensus that the Ottoman state was ultimately culpable
for the destruction of the Armenian community within its borders.

However, the government of Turkey, not the Armenian community, and
not the U.S. government, holds the key to this story. Indeed, while
we can construct historical interpretations through resolutions like
those adopted last week (and which have been adopted in a number of
other countries), this will bring us no closer to a full awareness
about the Ottoman state’s ultimate intention for deporting its
Armenian population or about its ultimate role in mass killings —
not to mention the deaths from disease and starvation that coincided
with this policy of deportation.

In considering this important subject, we cannot excuse the Ottoman
state from responsibility, nor can we deny the seriousness of these
events. They were more than simply the inevitable loss of life during
times of war. But, even if the full House and Senate ultimately
decide to recognize the Armenian genocide, we shouldn’t give up on
the effort to discover the true nature of these events. Moreover,
we should be extremely careful not to use the debate over the term
genocide to further constitute stereotypes about the current government
of Turkey or the Turkish people.

In the end, we must accept the political, historical, and moral project
of seeking to identify, explain, and learn from the destruction of
the Armenian community during the waning days of the Ottoman Empire
as we strive to prevent history from repeating itself.

Brian Mello, Ph.D., is assistant professor of political science at
Muhlenberg College in Allentown.

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